Bandit Queen

Bandit Queen is the name of a film about the life of Phoolan Devi, a village woman raped by the landlord of her village. She joins a band of dacoits to seek revenge on him. The following poem by a local poet and women's rights activist, Deepa Pathak, is about the reaction of some of the male spectators of the film.

Being a woman

The geography between two thighs

The anger of the raped body from centuries

The filthy comments

The eyes of the spectators compare

the truth of Choli ke Piche*

with the naked body of Phoolan

They are not with

the extreme grief of the raped woman

They try to find

images of Playboy and Debonair

in the black pages of her cursed life

Worms of unsatisfied lust

In the crowd, alone, in the bus, everywhere

Where can we escape from them?


* "Behind the blouse" — the words of a popular Hindi film song.

From GLW issue 237